Cerberian: vigilant watchdog.

• Author: Beers, Heather
• Position: Tech Talk

WANNA TAKE THE WAVE OUT of employee surfing habits? Thousands of companies rely on filters to curb nonessential Internet activity, and that filtering is most likely provided by Cerberian, a leading provider of web content filtering solutions for Internet-enabled products and services.

Draper-based Cerberian partners with clients such as Computer Associates, Zone Labs and SonicWALL, through which they offer customizable filtering technology.

Cerberian provides what companies are hungry for -- value-added outsourced filtering with smart devices, efficient deployment, scalable parameters and its unique Content Vectoring and Dynamic Real-Time Rating technology, which increases efficiency and speed.

"We looked at the market and saw a need. Net nannies, software - they weren't working. With millions of people surfing the Web worldwide and thousands of sites being created regularly, we knew there must be a better solution. We came up with our model for imbedded filtering," says Jeff Smith, CEO of Cerberian.

Partners place Cerberian's software containing the filtering protocol, with a tiny footprint of just eight kilobytes, on a company's hardware. When an employee or end-user types in a URL, that URL is cross-checked with Cerbetian's lookup servers. Within 45-90 milliseconds -- half of a half of a second -- that URL is admitted or rejected.

Who's the judge of what's in or out? Cerberian's clients. If MSTAR (a Cerberian partner ISP) knows its customers want to avoid...